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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Progress

Fellow blogger Lee runs a blog called Freshly Pieced, which I highly recommend. (You'll also find her button on my sidebar. I'm not even in her league when it comes to quilt-blogginess.) Every week, she has something called WIP Wednesday, which is a day when quilters can publicly display their progress on one or more Works in Progress during the week.

All of us quilters have projects that are not yet finished. Some call them UFOs (Unfinished Objects), some call them WIPs (Works in Progress), some quilters say the terms cannot be used interchangeably, and other quilters say they're all the same. I'm in the group that says anything not finished is both an UFO and (optimistically) a WIP.

This year, I'm in a UFO challenge in my online quilting group, where I have registered 14 UFOs in various stages of (in)completition. My actual goal is to finish five of these partially-finished quilts. One is the I-Spy Quilt for the 7-year-old little boy, which I'm describing below. Two of them are in cut-fabric-sitting-with-the-pattern stage (for two friends who had babies, although one of those babies is now two), one is in a needs-more-hand-quilting-so-it-doesn't-rip-apart stage, and one is in the tying/hand-quilting stage. I'm not going to worry about the other nine unless I make real progress extremely quickly this year.

The WIP in progress that I have made real progress in this week is the I-Spy Quilt for the 7-year-old boy in Ohio who I mentioned in an earlier post. Yesterday, I had six blocks done. As of today, I have all twenty blocks finished! (My son helped by taking a full nap today.)

All 20 squares for the I-Spy Quilt

Since I don't know the boy I'm making this quilt for, I tried to pick generic "boy" fabrics -- bugs, sports-themed fabric, guitars, tractors. I really hope that it ends up looking boyish enough when it's done.

Here are a couple close-ups of the blocks. (No, I don't have a design wall. Yes, it's on my list of things to try to put together this year. In the meantime, the floor of my sewing room is where everything gets laid out.)

What do you think? If you were a 7-year-old boy, would this work for you?

Next up is to cut and attach the sashing and the border, sandwich it, and I think I'm going to tie it so it gets to him faster. I will get this quilt finished and mailed in January. I don't want to leave this wonderful little boy without a blanket for too long.

Thanks! I was worried it was too young, but I guess 7 isn't really that old. :)

My problem is, I like to think I'm always at least thinking about all of my projects and planning what to do with them, when I can work with them, etc. And, every single project I have has been put to the side at some point for another project (either quilting, or knitting, or cross-stitch.) So, I like to think that everything just falls into both categories!